Attention has depreciated in value
I think we have come to the realization as a whole, slowly but steadily, that attention itself has become extremely vacuous. What does a million views mean? It used to mean something. It used to, to our naive minds, mean that a percentage would definitely convert to something else, something of your choice, whether it be sales or praise or whatever. Don't get me wrong, going viral still has its place; it's a boon for creators and brands to be seen by millions, but what effect does it have nowadays? I theorize that attention has depreciated in value given how divided our attention is. Just because we've seen it and liked the video doesn't mean that we are invested, and does seeing it still mean that we are aware of it anymore? It's a very crucial point in the marketing funnel; awareness is the first step. Even if it takes a few times for people to become aware of the brand, it will happen eventually. But I wonder if the time it takes for people to become aware of something has increased because we don't seem to be able to wield our attention at will anymore. With that, how is this currency, which is our attention, still valued the same as five years ago?
There has been some form of a movement in any community you can think of to slow down or to achieve mindfulness. The tech community has been raving about DIY cyberdecks, the reading community has been talking about a 24-hour bookathon, the World of Warcraft community has been talking about ditching higher-speed traveling from point to point because it prevents us from appreciating the journey, the self-help community has been pushing back the grind culture and the promotion of analog tools to help our lives, young parents have been trying to opt out of overstimulation-fest and return to what they knew as a child for their children, which are cartoons that's not engineered to hypercharge our dopamine, so on and so forth. There is a general need for a slower pace and for regaining control of our attention.
This isn't to devalue it completely because attention still has its intrinsic value, but at the same time, our collective disorientation and confusion, our impulse to just scroll and be numbed from the chaos around us, how likely is it nowadays that we are paying conscious attention? Is the attention we had and gave (at the beginning of this attention economy that we are in) to the brand's content and campaigns still affecting the sales chain the same way today? In that regard, it is likely that brands will spend months and months gearing towards a strategy that aims to generate attention, but fail to realize that the attention and views generated are all empty promises.
What can we do to make it stick? How can we reimagine our relationship with people's attention? How can we position our work, our brands, our products in the age of hyper-exhaustion and attention fatigue to rekindle that part of us? I write this to suggest that we all give it a good think.